A.G. Gancarski
Hemming Park is having its 150th anniversary this week, and a Wednesday meeting revealed that it’s on the right track, yet work remains to improve it regarding sustainable funding and enforcing community standards with more robust security.
A meeting between Jacksonville City Council members Bill Gulliford. Lori Boyer and Anna Brosche and Friends of Hemming Park’s Wayne Wood and Vince Cavin showed encouraging signs for the park, even as it identified issues to resolve going forward.
Gulliford, who was there a few years back when the park’s course was recharted, noted at the front of the meeting that the Park was “very successful to date” but there are “opportunities to make it better.”
Areas discussed in the meeting: funding, security, and plumbing for the new Black Sheep kiosk.
Cavin noted that since September 2014, the park has a full-time staff, and 600,000 people have come through since. This interest, he said, is due to aggressive and creative programming, which has led to 60 events drawing over 500 persons, well ahead of the city’s expectations of 20 such events.
The aforementioned programming, Wood said, is essential to driving out “people [up to] no good,” driven to the park for “nefarious” purposes.
Hemming Park, said Cavin, has become a “destination,” with lunch and learn events and other daytime programming. Additionally, Cavin said, an agreement is being worked out with Community First Bank.
In exchange for five years of naming rights, Cavin said that a stage refurbishment would happen; the wood and steel structure, he said, could last for a couple of decades.
Park operations require a necessary conflation of capital and operating costs that doesn’t exactly jibe with the city’s larger budgeting process.
To manage the park as Wood and Cavin would hope, $800,000 in yearly operating costs, coupled with another $200,000 in capital improvement costs per annum would be incurred. Revenues, between concessions, sponsorships, and donations, come out to about half a million dollars a year.
For now, at least, a $500,000 shortfall is apparent, and city matching dollars would seemingly be necessary to actualize the vision of Friends of Hemming Park.
Improvements that Wood and Cavin want include “major landscaping,” that would create more green spaces that would take the park back to its pre-1978 state, the year it became a plaza.
Also hoped for: improvements to the fountain, and public art installations, which they say could be implemented in such a way that discourages loitering and malingering.
Council members pushed back against the accounting semantics of Hemming Park, with Boyer saying there is a “real advantage to separating capital from operating costs.”
However, to donors, the issue is that they want corporate branding on capital improvements, such as the aforementioned stage.
General agreement was reached on the idea that a long-range plan is needed for the future of Hemming Park, yet divergence seemed to happen on the mechanics. Wood wanted a “long-range plan from the city,” while Gulliford suggested that Friends of Hemming Park devise its own five-year plan, akin to how capital improvement projects are planned out elsewhere in the city budget.
As Gulliford said, “all of this is nebulous until we get real numbers.”
Perhaps the most daunting issue Hemming faces, however, is one of security. While the need for better security, especially regarding the homeless and underemployed squatters in the park is generally acknowledged, achieving sustainable security is a different matter.
Wood recounted a litany of problems.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is “constrained” by First Amendment rights of park attendees, including trying to thwart loud cursing. As well, the FOHP desire to create smoke-free zones was frustrated by state law banning smoking in public places. Meanwhile, religious organizations can’t be prevented from feeding the homeless.
The General Counsel, in the meantime, is no help, saying that very little can be enforced in public parks.
The park, said Wood, is “perceived as a public park.” That perception, rooted in constitutional law, is “difficult to change.”
That contravened earlier General Counsel positions that a private entity, such as Friends of Hemming Park, could enforce community standards, Gulliford said.
Gulliford’s position: that the city and FOHP should be willing to “err on the side of operation.”
“If sued, fine, we’ll back off,” Gulliford said.
One issue is a lack of fencing around the park, that would restrict access and allow for a higher threshold of enforceability. This issue can be mitigated at ticketed, permitted events, where access is limited.
Expect more meetings on sustainable funding and solving the security issues in February.
